By now you know the importance of talking to your baby early and often: while she scoops cheerios in her highchair, during a stroll in the park, on the changing table. But that’s only the half of it; it’s equally important to know how to talk to your baby.

First of all, the amount of language our little ones hear has a big impact on their development. For example, kids growing up in families on welfare hear an average of 600 words an hour, those in working-class families hear 1,250 words an hour, and those in professional families hear roughly 2,100 words an hour. That means every year, a child from a family receiving welfare hears 3.2 million words while the average child in a professional home hears 11 million. This word gap correlates with lingual ability later in life: at age three, kids in professional families have vocabularies of roughly 1,100 words, with children in the lowest economic bracket speaking roughly 500 words. The amount of language directed at kids in the first three years of life is estimated to account for half of the variance in cognitive performance and vocabulary at age 3 and age 9.

As a parent, your initial reaction to hearing this is to dial up the talking in your home. And many of us have: I see diligent parents all the time, providing running commentary and narration with their babbling companions in tow. But with a closer look at the research, encouraging parents to talk to their babies turns out to be an oversimplified piece of advice — and one that actually misses many of the critical aspects of vocabulary development for the youngest children.

A barrage of words is not the gold standard. In fact, it probably gets in the way of an even more important process for our children’s language learning.

To understand how babies acquire language, psychologists at NYU videotape and analyze parent-baby interactions and track babies’ development over time. They find that a parent’s language does indeed play a big role in shaping how fluent their children become, but parents’ response to baby language is what makes the difference. In one experiment with moms and their 9- or 13 month-olds, researchers showed that a baby’s verbal prowess was related to how good mom was at watching, expanding on, and describing the world based on her baby’s words and gestures. A mom’s responsiveness to her baby’s talk and movements predicted the age at which the babies reached milestones like saying their first words, having 50 words in their vocabularies, putting two words

together, and speaking in the past tense. Mom’s response predicted these milestones over and above the baby’s own vocalizations and gestures at those ages.

Dr. Tamis-Lemonda, who directs the research, explains that hearing a whole bunch of words doesn’t do a baby much good, unless the parent is actually helping the baby make sense of them. “If parents think, ‘all I need to do is talk,’” she says, “well, that would be a real puzzle for kids. Because what do all those words actually mean?”

How do you teach meaning to babies? Between the ages of nine months and two years, the key is to use the baby’s perspective as the springboard for teaching. A three-year-old may be savvy enough to redirect his attention and follow a parent to learn new words, but younger children need the reverse: they need us to follow them. “If the baby is playing with a cup and the parent says, ‘look at the dolly!’ the baby is much less likely to learn that word,” says Tamis-LeMonda. When you talk about the cup, on the other hand, you link visual and tactile information (I see the cup in my hands) with auditory information (hearing the word “cup”). It’s this linking across sensory systems that solidifies learning.

Language growth is about quality, not just quantity. For example, in addition to hearing fewer words, kids from different backgrounds hear very different types of words. Children in professional families have been found to hear 32 encouraging words and 5 prohibitions per hour on average, while in working class families it’s 12 affirmations and 7 prohibitions per hour, and in families from lower socioeconomic classes, 5 affirmations, but 11 prohibitions. Over four years, that makes almost half a million more instances of encouragement from affluent families, and 125,000 more discouragements in lower-income families. Research suggests that this significant difference in positive versus negative feedback is what attributes to the language gap between classes. Simply put, the more positive affirmations a child receives in conversation, the greater their grasp of language will be. Studies also find that qualities like how often moms ask “wh” questions (who, what, when, where, which, why, how) correlate to a child’s language skills and predicts later school-readiness.

In other words, it’s easy to take the advice to talk to your baby and run with it, but as conscientious parents we tend to fall prey to the idea that if something is good for our child, more of it must be better. Yes, hearing lots of words is crucial to a baby’s development, because, as Tamis-LeMonda puts it, “the only language they’ll use is the language they hear.” But watching and listening, so you can provide contingent responses, is what research shows to be most powerful. How many times has your baby or toddler started a thought, only to have you jump in and finish it? (I’m guilty of this too). Listening is a skill, and it’s hard sometimes. Listening well means observing your child with curiosity, wondering what she’s going to say or do next, and resisting the urge to interrupt. It means pausing and letting there be silence, but still staying engaged. In fact, research has shown that you don’t need words to encourage your baby’s talking; just smiling, moving closer to your baby, or touching her is enough to immediately make her vocalizations more sophisticated.

The other day, I practiced conversing with my 17-month old over lunch by being quiet but watching her round, little face to see where her train of thought would take her. She did plenty of banging her fork on the table, waving avocado in the air, and rotating through both English and Ewok-sounding phrases. But then she started making sounds I hadn’t noticed before. “She’s singing the ABCs,” my husband guessed. We smiled and bopped our heads, but resisted the urge to chime in and join her. Sure enough, she had the rough outline of the alphabet and seemed delighted at the opportunity to perform it for us while we just watched. I never would have known that language was filed away in her rapidly growing brain. Encouragement, but also a little space, gave her the opportunity to share it with me.

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My family and I were hobbling back to our hotel room yesterday afternoon after I finished running the Boston Marathon when we noticed the shops in the mall we were walking through were closing. It looked as though people were being shuttled outside. And then we saw that the fire alarms were flashing. But it wasn’t until we went back outside that we first heard the word “explosion” mentioned, or saw everybody on the street talking on their cell phones. (A surprisingly eerie and ominous sight, I assure you.)

I had finished the race about an hour before and we were well out of harm’s way when the bombs went off and the race was suspended. But we were not unaffected. My husband and I spent much of the next few hours responding to phone calls and texts and e-mails and Facebook postings inquiring about our safety. And we wondered what impact this, and the news report we had turnd on, would have on our boys.

Certainly they were aware that something was not quite right. When we turned on the news my older son, who turns 6 tomorrow, helpfully informed his 3-year-old brother of what had just been said on the TV. “Oh! There were two bombs! And two people are dead and twenty-three injured.” (That was the report at the time.) I was a little surprised at how unconcered they were. They had no problem switching from, “There were two bombs!” to “Let’s go to the pool!”

And we did go to the pool. We had a great time. Then we dried off, changed clothes, and went to dinner. My husband and I exchanged concerned glances as we passed by the SWAT police officer standing with his assault rifle just outside our hotel, but the boys didn’t even notice him.

Perhaps their lack of concern was troubling to me. And maybe I was feeling like I needed do something to keep my kids safe – even if it was entirely unrelated to the bombing. Perhaps that is why, after dinner, I felt like I needed to remind them that they are to never ever ever go near water – a lake, a river, an ocean, a pool – unless Mom or Dad are with them. Truth be told, I wanted to make them afraid, just a little bit, of the water.

But by the end of my little spiel, my older son was wiping away tears, whether from fear of the water he had just been playing in or because he thought I was mad at him, I haven’t been able to get out of him. So in addition to our water safety talk, we had a longer lecture/discussion about learning to being safe but not afraid.

I was puzzled for a minute or two about how my son could shrug off the explosions so easily but be driven to tears by the water conversation. It didn’t take me too long to figure out: Their proximity to the bombing was unimportant. They did not see it happen. Both their parents were with them and unharmed (aside from their mother’s sore knee). It didn’t involve them in any real way. But they do love to swim and play in the water. The knowledge that danger lurks under the surface of something so fun was and is troubling. For all of us.

And why did I feel like I needed to scare my children? Was it really because they showed so little concern at having been within a couple of blocks of a deadly bomb? I think not. Not entirely. I think it was because there are things I can do to protect my children and things I can’t. Placing the bomb and the swimming pool in such stark relief reminded me of that. Nobody knows when or where there may be an explosion (bomb, gas leak, or whatever). That is something I cannot really protect my children from. But I can and should protect them (as much as possible) from swimming pools, cars, knives, fire, etc. And to do that requires alerting them to the danger and teaching them how to avoid it. Being safe, being aware of the danger, but not so frightened of it that they are paralyzed by it. In the face of powerlessness, I zealously seized the opportunity to do something, anything, to feel like I was doing my job as a mom.

It was clearly not a perfect parenting moment. But as a parent, I did learn from it, or I think I am beginning to. I am realizing the value in teaching fearlessness in everyday life, but in helping to nurture healthy, protective fears alongside that fearlessness. We cannot live life if we are afraid to go outside, but neither can we live life if we don’t manage the dangers we are constantly faced with.

And the more I think of it, the more I think my son was right on track with his responses to the day’s events: he took the bombing with a matter-of-factness that mirrors, I believe, the resignation, the acceptance, we need to learn to live with in this imperfect world where people make bad, harmful decisions. But his deep feeling when confronted with the preventable tragedies reflects the urgent need to teach and nurture an informed caution and carefulness. For both kinds of tragedies there is only one response once they have happened: we must hope and help until those who have been hurt are healed.

Photo was taken this morning outside our hotel room window.

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I go to bed a little before midnight. By 2:00am, I’m bringing my daughter into bed so she can nurse and I can sleep. At 5:00am, she’s awake again, pinching my face and trying to soothe herself. My alarm goes off at 6:20am. I’m out the door half an hour later, putting 6 more miles on my legs in preparation for the Boston Marathon, which I’ll be running for my first time on April 15th.

Though I come home refreshed and feeling good, after I’ve showered and done the dishes and helped my 3 kids get dressed, I sit down to read stories and have a hard time keeping my eyes open. If I’m able to make it through the story, I’ll get up and walk around, just to get the blood flowing again. If I’m not, and the baby is napping, I’ll tell my boys that I just need to lie down for ten minutes or so. They’re free to read or play until I wake up.

Some days I really feel like I’m dragging. On those days I count how many more weeks until the race. Five more? Four more? Can I handle it? Can I make it? On other days I wonder why I decided to do this now of all times, with 3 kids at home, the baby still nursing. Certainly there could have been a better time to train for a marathon? But then, why not now? Now, when it would be so easy to say I’m too tired, too busy, too consumed in the tasks of caring for those who are so dependent on me? Because now is when I need it the most. It motivates me to take care of myself, to get out there and give myself some time when that is both the hardest thing and, perhaps, the best thing for my family.

I look forward to the marathon as if it will be the end of early mornings and late nights, the end of cat naps on the couch, the end of sore legs and sweaty running clothes. In reality, it will be none of those things. I may take a week off once the marathon is over, but I know there will be more races, more early mornings, more long weekend runs. I know this because I know what running does for me mentally, physically, and emotionally. I know it helps me be a better mom. I also know that there are parts of motherhood that are slow to show results. There are things that I do now that I only hope will pay off for my kids in 18 or 25 or 40 years. It can be frustrating for me to work so hard and to put so much of myself into something that is so important, but so immeasurable.

But when I run, when I train, when I race, I can work toward things that are measurable. I can chart my progress. I can see and feel the small victories and know that I’m improving, that my work is paying off, that I’m getting stronger and fitter and faster. And while those are things that help me to feel like I’m succeeding as a person, those things spill over into my family life as well. My sons have accompanied me on many runs from their seats in our double jogger. For them, running is a part of life, a part of our family. We are active and alive together. They have cheered me on at races and even run a few of their own. They’ve had the chance to push themselves and to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes when crossing any finish line.

All those late nights and early mornings, all the blisters and lost toenails and chafed skin that come from training for any big race are, I feel, motherhood in microcosm. They are evidence that even that small annoyances, when persevered through, can have big payoffs. They are proof that hard work and mindful effort do bring good results. They help me see that I can handle difficult stages in development, and that in handling them, I am made stronger, more capable, more aware, more compassionate.

So while I do look forward to running that marathon next month, it is not because it signals an end, but because it is a milestone, a resting point, a place for evaluation. I’ll move on to the next goal, the next race, the next stage with a little more knowledge, a little more understanding, a little more strength to work with.

And maybe in that stage I’ll get to bed before midnight and sleep the whole night through.

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